The dark side of recruitment in crowdsourcing: ethics and transparency in micro-task marketplaces

Micro-task crowdsourcing marketplaces like Figure Eight (F8) connect a large pool of workers to employers through a single online platform, by aggregating multiple crowdsourcing platforms (channels) under a unique system. This paper investigates the F8 channels’ demographic distribution and reward schemes by analysing more than 53k crowdsourcing tasks over four years, collecting survey data and scraping marketplace metadata. We reveal an heterogeneous per-channel demographic distribution, and an opaque channel commission scheme, that varies over time and is not communicated to the employer when launching a task: workers often will receive a smaller payment than expected by the employer. In addition, the impact of channel commission schemes on the relationship between requesters and crowdworkers is explored. These observations uncover important issues on ethics, reliability and transparency of crowdsourced experiment when using this kind of marketplaces, especially for academic research

Crowdsourcing in China: Exploring the Work Experience of Solo Crowdworkers and Crowdfarm Workers

Recent research highlights the potential of crowdsourcing in China. Yet very few studies explore the workplace context and experiences of Chinese crowdworkers. Those that do, focus mainly on the work experiences of solo crowdworkers but do not deal with issues pertaining to the substantial amount of people working in ‘crowdfarms’. This article addresses this gap as one of its primary concerns. Drawing on a study that involves 48 participants, our research explores, compares and contrasts the work experiences of solo crowdworkers to those of crowdfarm workers. Our findings illustrate that the work experiences and context of the solo workers and crowdfarm workers are substantially different, with regards to their motivations, the ways they engage with crowdsourcing, the tasks they work on, and the crowdsourcing platforms they utilize. Overall, our study contributes to furthering the understandings on the work experiences of crowdworkers in China

Time as Currency: A Value Sensitive Design Exploration of Crowdworkers' Temporal Flexibility

Over the past decade, there has been a rise in the number of people working on crowdsourcing platforms. Although those who work on crowdworking platforms (i.e., crowdworkers) value having autonomy over scheduling their own time, research suggests that they do not benefit from the temporal flexibility to choose when and for how long to work. Therefore, in this thesis, we aim to understand what limits the temporal flexibility of crowdworkers, and how this aspect impacts the workers. Our ultimate goal is to inform the design of future crowdsourcing platforms. To achieve the aim of this thesis, we employ Value Sensitive Design (VSD) as our theory and design framework. Using the lens of VSD and a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, we show that crowdworkers’ temporal flexibility is limited by three different types of time constraints: (i) worker-imposed time constraints, (ii) client-imposed time constraints, and (iii) platform-imposed time constraints. These time constraints limit: (a) the temporal working preferences of workers, (b) the time workers have to make decisions, and (c) the work pace and work schedules of workers. Ultimately, we confirm that the existing features of crowdsourcing platforms do not fully support flexible temporal arrangements for workers; instead, these platforms favour clients’ flexibility to workers’ detriment. In this thesis, we make three contributions to HCI and CSCW. The contributions are to the knowledge, practice, and design of crowdsourcing platforms. Firstly, we provide empirical evidence to show how time constraints impact crowdworkers. Secondly, we provide a conceptual framework of time constraints within crowdsourcing platforms. Finally, we provide a series of design goals that embody temporal flexibility as a value of central interest for crowdworkers

It's getting crowded! : improving the effectiveness of microtask crowdsourcing

[no abstract

To Speak up or Shut up? Revealing the Drivers of Crowdworker Voice Behaviors in Crowdsourcing Work Environments

This study examines worker voice behaviors in the microtask crowdsourcing work environment (CSWE) where voice channels are absent. Informed by employee voice research, this study adopts the revealed causal mapping method to analyze the detailed narratives of 60 workers from Amazon Mechanical Turk. Our data analysis shows that the crowdworkers did engage in voice behaviors, but their voices were not always heard, depending on recipients. The crowdworker voice was directed to three different recipients (worker community, job requester, and platform) and influenced by six antecedents (duty orientation, efficacy judgment, workgroup identification, anger/frustration, futility, and achievement orientation). Based on the findings, we propose a model of worker voice antecedents and moderators in the CSWE. This study extends employee voice research by presenting a moderator perspective in the CSWE. Moreover, our study provides a nuanced understanding of crowdworker voice behaviors from two major aspects – antecedent and recipient – contributing to crowdsourcing research

Determinations of Other-Regarding Behavior and the Private Provision of Public Goods

Diese Arbeit leistet einen Beitrag zur Forschung, die die im ökonomischen Standardmodell verwendete Annahme des eng gefassten Eigeninteresses in Frage stellt. Der erste Teil der Arbeit umfasst drei experimentelle Studien über soziale Präferenzen. Der zweite Teil der Arbeit umfasst drei Studien, die sich in die Literatur zur privaten Bereitstellung öffentlicher Güter einfügen. Jahrzehntelange experimentelle Forschung mit öffentlichen Gütern, Ultimatum-, Vertrauens- und Diktatorspielen hat gezeigt, dass Individuen selbst bei anonymen One-Shot-Entscheidungen auf monetäre Auszahlungen zum Nutzen anderer verzichten. Eine Erklärung für dieses Verhalten ist, dass Individuen eine Präferenz für eine gerechte Verteilung haben. Das Verhalten hängt jedoch nicht nur von der Verteilung der Auszahlungen ab, sondern auch von dem Prozess, der zu dieser Verteilung führt. Zu den prozessbezogenen Merkmalen gehören die Absicht der beteiligten Entscheidungsträger und damit zusammenhängend das Ausmaß, in dem ihnen kausal die Verantwortung zugeschrieben werden kann, die Fairness der Verfahren oder die Einhaltung bestimmter sozialer oder moralischer Normen. Alle drei Studien im ersten Teil dieser Arbeit untersuchen das Verhalten in Situationen, in denen Entscheidungen wahrscheinlich von den Folgen für die Verteilung der Auszahlungen beeinflusst wird, in denen aber wahrscheinlich auch andere Determinanten eine Rolle spielen. Die Studien untersuchen (1) die Rolle einer fairen Verteilung auf das Verbraucherverhalten bei Preisdiskriminierung, (2) wie verschiedene Ausreden, die sich aus der Ungewissheit über die Folgen des eigenen Handelns für andere ergeben, egoistisches Verhalten beeinflussen und (3) die Rolle der Beobachtbarkeit von Unehrlichkeit beim Lügen in einer Online-Umgebung. Das Versagen der Märkte, ein effizientes Maß an öffentlichen Gütern bereitzustellen, wird als einer der Hauptgründe für staatliche Eingriffe angesehen. Die jahrzehntelange Forschung in der Verhaltensökonomie zeigt jedoch, dass die privaten Beiträge im Allgemeinen höher sind, als es das reine Eigeninteresse vorhersagt. Wissenschaftler sind seit langem daran interessiert, die zugrunde liegenden Präferenzen für private Beiträge zu öffentlichen Gütern zu verstehen. Diese Forschung hat eine Reihe von Motiven für Beiträge untersucht, die über das reine Eigeninteresse hinausgehen, hat aber auch zu möglichen Erklärungen geführt, die in den Bereich des Eigeninteresses fallen, wie etwa ein kurzfristiger positiver Grenznutzen oder langfristige Signalanreize. Der zweite Teil dieser Arbeit kann in diese Literatur eingeordnet werden. Studie vier untersucht die Auswirkung von Gamification auf die intrinsische Motivation und die Leistungserbringung bei einer Aufgabe, die wichtige Merkmale von sogenannten Micro-tasks nachahmt, wie sie typischerweise in Crowdsourcing-Projekten für öffentliche Güter vorkommen. Die Studien fünf und sechs untersuchen digitale öffentliche Güter im Kontext der EU-Chemikalienverordnung REACH, bewerten, wie effektiv das öffentliche Gut bereitgestellt wird, und diskutieren mögliche Anpassungen, um die Anreize für Personen zu erhöhen, die freiwillig zu dem Gut beitragen.This thesis contributes to research that challenges the narrow self-interest assumption used in the standard economic model. The first part of the thesis includes three experimental studies on social preferences. The second part of the thesis includes three studies that fit into the literature on private provision of public goods. Decades of experimental research with public goods, ultimatum, trust, and dictator games have shown that individuals forgo monetary payoffs for the benefit of others even in anonymous one-shot decisions. One explanation for this behavior is that individuals have a preference for fair distribution. However, behavior depends not only on the distribution of payoffs, but also on the process that leads to that distribution. Process-related characteristics include the intent of the decision makers involved and, relatedly, the extent to which causal responsibility can be attributed to them, the fairness of the procedures, or the adherence to certain social or moral norms. All three studies in the first part of this paper examine behavior in situations where decisions are likely to be influenced by consequences for the distribution of payoffs, but where other determinants are also likely to play a role. The studies examine (1) the role of a fair distribution on consumer behavior in the presence of price discrimination, (2) how various excuses arising from uncertainty about the consequences of one's actions for others influence selfish behavior, and (3) the role of observability of dishonesty in lying in an online environment. The failure of markets to provide an efficient level of public goods is seen as one of the main reasons for government intervention. However, decades of research in behavioral economics show that private contributions are generally higher than pure self-interest predicts. Scholars have long been interested in understanding the underlying preferences for private contributions to public goods. This research has explored a range of motivations for contributions that go beyond pure self-interest, but has also led to possible explanations that fall within the realm of self-interest, such as short-term positive marginal utility or long-term signaling incentives. The second part of this thesis can be placed in this literature. Study four examines the impact of gamification on intrinsic motivation and performance in a task that mimics important features of so-called micro-tasks typically found in public goods crowdsourcing projects. Studies five and six examine digital public goods in the context of the EU REACH chemicals regulation, assess how effectively the public good is delivered, and discuss possible adaptations to increase incentives for individuals who voluntarily contribute to the good.2021-10-1

Unleashing the Potential of Crowd Work: The Need for a Post-Taylorism Crowdsourcing Model

Paid crowdsourcing connects task requesters to a globalized, skilled workforce that is available 24/7. In doing so, this new labor model promises not only to complete work faster and more efficiently than any previous approach but also to harness the best of our collective capacities. Nevertheless, for almost a decade now, crowdsourcing has been limited to addressing rather straightforward and simple tasks. Large-scale innovation, creativity, and wicked problem solving are still largely out of the crowd’s reach. In this opinion paper, we argue that existing crowdsourcing practices bear significant resemblance to the management paradigm of Taylorism. Although criticized and often abandoned by modern organizations, Taylorism principles are prevalent in many crowdsourcing platforms, which employ practices such as the forceful decomposition of all tasks regardless of their knowledge nature and the disallowing of worker interactions, which diminish worker motivation and performance. We argue that a shift toward post-Taylorism is necessary to enable the crowd address at scale the complex problems that form the backbone of today’s knowledge economy. Drawing from recent literature, we highlight four design rules that can help make this shift, namely, endorsing social crowd networks, encouraging teamwork, scaffolding ownership of one’s work within the crowd, and leveraging algorithm-guided worker self-coordination.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/171075/1/Lykourentzou et al. 2021.pdfDescription of Lykourentzou et al. 2021.pdf : Final ArticleSEL

Systems for Managing Work-Related Transitions

Peoples' work lives have become ever-populated with transitions across tasks, devices, and environments. Despite their ubiquitous nature, managing transitions across these three domains has remained a significant challenge. Current systems and interfaces for managing transitions have explored approaches that allow users to track work-related information or automatically capture or infer context, but do little to support user autonomy at its fullest. In this dissertation, we present three studies that support the goal of designing and understanding systems for managing work-related transitions. Our inquiry is motivated by the notion that people lack the ability to continue or discontinue their work at the level they wish to do so. We scope our research to information work settings, and we use our three studies to generate novel insights about how empowering peoples' ability to engage with their work can mitigate the challenges of managing work-related transitions. We first introduce and study Mercury, a system that mitigates programmers' challenges in transitioning across devices and environments by enabling their ability to continue work on-the-go. Mercury orchestrates programmers' work practices by providing them with a series of auto-generated microtasks on their mobile device based on the current state of their source code. Tasks in Mercury are designed so that they can be completed quickly without the need for additional context, making them suitable to address during brief moments of downtime. When users complete microtasks on-the-go, Mercury calculates file changes and integrates them into the user's codebase to support task resumption. We then introduce SwitchBot, a conversational system that mitigates the challenges in discontinuing work during the transition between home and the workplace. SwitchBot's design philosophy is centered on assisting information workers in detaching from and reattaching with their work through brief conversations before the start and end of the workday. By design, SwitchBot's detachment and reattachment dialogues inquire about users' task-related goals or user's emotion-related goals. We evaluated SwitchBot with an emphasis on understanding how the system and its two dialogues uniquely affected information workers' ability to detach from and later reattach with their work. Following our study of Mercury and SwitchBot, we present findings from an interview study with crowdworkers aimed at understanding the work-related transitions they experience in their work practice from the perspective of tools. We characterize the tooling observed in crowdworkers' work practices and identified three types of "fragmentation" that are motivated by tooling in the practice. Our study highlights several distinctions between traditional and contemporary information work settings and lays a foundation for future systems that aid next-generation information workers in managing work-related transitions. We conclude by outlining this dissertation's contributions and future research directions

The Impact of Perceived Leadership Styles on Hotel Employee Job Engagement

Engaged employees have a positive impact on organizational outcomes. In fact, employees who are highly committed to their jobs tend to perform better, and such employees are less likely to quit. Leaders in the workplace have the potential to influence employee work engagement. Different leadership styles might drive employee engagement to different extents. The purposes of this study are twofold: to identify the leadership styles and drivers that lead to engaged employees, and to contribute to the literature of employee engagement in the context of hospitality and tourism. This study used a quantitative method, specifically survey that was distributed to the United States hotel employees through Amazon M-Turk. The survey measures employee level of engagement using UWES and leadership styles using MLQ in addition to 18 drivers of engagement and 10 demographic questions. This study found that ‘fairness’ was evaluated as the most valuable driver to make employees feel engaged at work. The findings of this study showed that there is significant relationship between transformational and transactional leadership behavior and employee engagement whilst significant negative correlation was found between the perceived passive/avoidant leadership and employee engagement. Discussion, implications, limitations, and future research are presented

I AM A CROWD WORKER – HOW INDIVIDUALS IDENTIFY WITH A NEW FORM OF DIGITAL WORK

Crowd work has emerged as a new form of digital gainful employment that changes the nature of work. However, an increasing number of people perform certain tasks in the crowd and start to identify with this work. In this paper, we outline our research in progress which is concerned with the effects of work characteristics in crowd work that have impact on the individual’s identification. Thus, we developed our research model and conducted an online survey amongst 434 crowd workers to ex-amine their perception of work and illustrate the antecedences of identification. Our expected contribution will increase the understanding of crowd work and extend prior research on self-determination theory (SDT) and work design. For practice, we provide important insights for platform providers to (re-) design work on platform in order to increase identification among their crowd. In addition, our findings can serve as common basis for future discussions on decent crowd work